Program Notes

Program 3 Notes

Guide to Strange Places

Choreographer Ashley Page has a quiet energy about him, like a fountain that’s
overflowing. Talk to him and you’ll find him bubbling with ideas and observations.
Watch him in the studio and you’ll see him pour textures and tones into the
movement he’s matching to the dancers ’ personalities and physiques. For
his first work for San Francisco Ballet, the former Scottish Ballet artistic director
created a physical and movement world for 18 dancers in which his ballet roots, modern
dance influences, and love of the visual arts are in full view.

Music is “my biggest passion,” says Page.“Although I love all
the art forms—literature, film, visual arts—music’s the thing that’s
been with me the longest and has always been an inspiration.” Bay Area composer
John Adams’ Guide to StrangePlaces “was one of the
first things to pop into my head,” he says about his choice of music for this
ballet. “I felt it was the right piece for this company, certainly for my first
time working with them. I felt confident that I could do something with it with them.”

Adams’ Guide to Strange Places was inspired by a book he found in
a Provence farmhouse, called Guide noir de laProvence mystérieuse
(A Black Guide toMysterious Provence). As quoted in the CD
liner notes for a St. Louis Symphony recording of the music (Nonesuch), Adams said,
“A chapter was dedicated to paysages insolites—or ‘strange
places.’ . .. It set my imagination off. . . . In a sense, all of my pieces
are travel pieces, often through paysages insolites—it’s the
way I experience musical form.” In Guide toStrange Places, that
form is driving and explosive, music that makes your heart jackhammer. The ending,
says Page, is “incredible, so powerful, like a beast rolling over and dying
or the earth splitting. It gets so savage and earthy and organic.”Page, who
danced with The Royal Ballet, began dabbling in choreography in 1981; his first professional
work for that company was in 1984, the same year he was promoted to principal dancer.
He cites multiple choreographic influences, such as Richard Alston, whom he calls
a mentor and great friend; Frederick Ashton, “with works like Scènes
de ballet,Cinderella, and Symphonic Variations— that
clutch of works in the late ’40s particularly”; and George Balanchine,
Trisha Brown, and Merce Cunningham.

But it was stepping outside the confines of The Royal Ballet, Page says, that changed
the way he perceived dance and what he wanted to do with it. “What I discovered
outside the company was dancing and choreography that seemed to be commenting on the
nature of classicism in a very enlightening way, yet it was completely contemporary.”
Later, he learned about narrative power in choreographing four full-length ballets
for Scottish Ballet—dark, revisionist approaches to Nutcracker, The SleepingBeauty, Cinderella, and Alice.

For Guide to Strange Places, Page devised a series of duets within an
ensemble work. Each duet has a flavor and texture that come partially from the music
and partially from the dancers; part of his choreographic process is “responding
to those people and choosing the right piece of music to go with what I want to get
out of them.” One “is quite predatory and savage. She’s calling
the shots and he’s dealing with her,” he says. Another is “faster
and lighter. It’s got a delicacy about it. It’s almost like a romantic
duet, but it isn’t.” A third is “very sensual,” danced to
music that is “quite searing.”Much more fun, Page says, is a “mercurial
couple” who dance multiple short duets.“ So they are kind of the link
between things.”

Working with designer Jon Morrell, Page has incorporated satellite images of a
decidedly strange place into the world he has envisioned for his dancers. This visual
context, drawn from a place that’s partly manmade and partly organic, is the
perfect tie-in to Adams’ score—and thus to the choreography, which Page
calls “a complete response to the music.”

Program notes by Cheryl A. Ossola

Beaux

If you’ve never heard of a revival harpsichord, choreographer Mark Morris’
Beaux will change that. It’s “big, clunky, wonderful, and underappreciated,”
he says. And as the predominant instrument in two harpsichord compositions by Bohuslav
Martinů, the music for Beaux, it will make you think twice about what
harpsichord music can be. The instrument’s sound, says the choreographer, is
louder and more aggressive than a traditional harpsichord’s. “It’s
an unusual instrument and not very popular right now,” he says. “I think
it’s fabulous.”

Much of the credit for the revival of the harpsichord goes to Polish musician Wanda
Landowska. “When she was at her peak, in the ’30s, baroque music was played
primarily on the piano and there was no such thing as the early music movement, so
no one had built new harpsichords in the style of Renaissance and baroque instruments,”
says Morris.“She wanted new music to play that people could hear in a modern
concert hall, and so this sort of hybrid instrument came up that now people scorn
because it lacks subtlety. You wouldn’t play baroque music on that. It’s
not a baroque instrument playing modern music; it’s a modern instrument playing
modernist music."

The artistic director of Mark Morris Dance Group since 1980, Morris is known for
his passion for music. Lately, he says, “I’ve done a lot of scores from
the early 20th century, from the teens, ’20s, and ’30s, because I like
that point of view of early modernism. The 20th century and the 18th century are my
specialty centuries, as far as music and aesthetics go.” In choosing to work
with Martinů’s modernist music for harpsichord, Morris manages to encompass
both. One of the pieces he chose, a concerto, is one of a handful of 20th-century
compositions that brought the harpsichord back in a new way; in it, the harpsichord
is paired with piano. “I love the sound of those two together,” Morris
says. “A harpsichord’s phrasing is always through rubato and timing and
you can’t do much with touch, which is why there’s also a piano.”
Morris has created more than 150 dances in his 31 years as a choreographer, nine of
which are in San Francisco Ballet’s repertory. (Of those nine, only Drink
to Me Only With Thine Eyes wasn’t created for SF Ballet.) His process for
creating a dance hasn’t changed over the years, he says. “I study the
score as I always do, and then I just make up a dance on the spot with the people
who are in it. I plan, but I don’t know what the moves are going to be.”Working
with a ballet company is always a different experience from creating on his own dancers,
who “can unfortunately read my mind. For good or ill, they know what’s
coming,” Morris says. “I’m interested in making up dances that are
softer and more intimate and gentler, more tender, in execution—not so positional
and not so flashy.”

Beaux, which made its world premiere during the 2012 Repertory Season,
features striking costumes and a large scale backdrop by iconic fashion designer Isaac
Mizrahi. The presentation is a perfect match for Morris’ intent. “I wanted
to make up a dance with all the gentlemen that is not just about what men are compelled
to do in the ballet industry,” he says. “I’m not that interested
in the big, hard steps. My work is difficult and virtuosic in a way that isn’t
exploding in midair; that’s something I’m not wild about seeing. I want
a wider range of dancing than I often see in the ballet language. And [the men] aren’t
used to partnering each other, so that makes them crazy, and it’s beautiful.”

The SF Ballet men, Morris says, are “wonderful and energetic and surprising,
and I like to make that part of the dance.”

Program notes by Cheryl A. Ossola

Possokhov's The Rite of Spring

One hundred years ago, on May 29,1913, at the Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris,
cultural history took a major step forward. Vaslav Nijinsky’s new ballet
for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Le Sacre du printemps (The
Riteof Spring), set to Igor Stravinsky’s now-iconic score, shook
the foundations and preconceptions of the ballet world so hard that it literally caused
a riot. Still today, the shockwaves continue to reverberate. Versions of this ballet,
which disappeared from the Ballets Russes repertory quickly after a dozen or so performances,
are now performed by ballet and modern-dance companies worldwide. And now, in The
Rite ofSpring’s centenary year, it’s San Francisco Ballet’s
turn. In adding it to the Company’s repertory, Artistic Director & Principal
Choreographer Helgi Tomasson turned to Choreographer in Residence Yuri Possokhov.

Possokhov was skeptical at first. Compared to making his Firebird (also
to a Stravinsky score), he says The Rite ofSpring is much more
challenging. “It takes time to digest music and idea, because it’s not
just a fairy tale. It means much more than fairy tales,” he says. “And
especially after one hundred years of performances of this music, you understand how
it’s so contemporary.” It reflects “what’s happening in the
world, some dark sides of our society,” he says. “For me, this music is
so matched to political and social life of the earth.”

The Rite of Spring dramatizes the pagan ritual of human sacrifice practiced
in ancient Russia, depicting humanity at its most primitive. The subject matter alone
was not exactly typical of ballet, and neither was Nijinsky’s movement. Depending
on whose version of history you read, the turned-in, pounding, grotesque movement
was to blame for the rioting at the premiere—or the unimaginably strange music,
or both. What’s well documented is that the high-society ballet goers and young
artists of Paris shouted in protest, yanked hats down over eyes, wielded canes and
umbrellas as weapons, and threw punches. Uproar turned to outright brawling, and the
police were called. Backstage, shouting above the din, Nijinsky stood on a chair yelling
out the counts to his dancers, who couldn’t hear the music over the boisterous
crowd. And according to Stravinsky, Diaghilev, who enjoyed upsetting the status quo
with the innovations of his Paris-based troupe, said of the evening’s turn of
events: “Exactly what I wanted.”

“For me, this music is so matched to political and social life of the earth.”
Yuri Possokhov, SF Ballet Choreographer in Residence

What Possokhov wants, in creating his own interpretation of this famous ballet,
is to avoid the past, meaning his own training in Grigorovich-style movement (“close
to folk,” he says) as well as the versions of The Rite of Spring he’s
seen, which include Nijinsky’s and Pina Bausch’s. “I’m trying
to avoid everything that I saw before. I think it’s hopeless,” he says.
“A couple you can’t escape from, especially the first version.”
For him, the first one was Nijinsky’s, which he saw when he was 20 or 21, performed
by Paris Opera Ballet at the Bolshoi. “It was very shocking inspiration; I loved
it so much,” Possokhov says. “I was thriving on the [kind of] ballet I
never saw; strange, with strange music.”

Though its roots are Russian (choreographer, composer, and setting), The Rite
ofSpring is so universally appealing to choreographers “that
it’s beyond tradition,” Possokhov says. Among the many productions are
those by Leonide Massine (1920; with Martha Graham in 1930), Mary Wigman (1957), Maurice
Bejart (1959), Sir Kenneth MacMillan (1962), Vladimir Vasiliov and Natalia Kasatkina
(1964),Glen Tetley (1973), Pina Bausch (1975), Paul Taylor (1980), Angelin Preljocaj(2001),
Adam Hoagland (2009), and Christopher Stowell (2011). The centenary year will be filled
with revivals and premieres, including Wayne McGregor’s for the Bolshoi.

Although he doesn’t see The Rite of Spring as representative of
Russia, Possokhov does evoke his native country in his version, both in the movement
and in the birch trees that dominate the setting. In rehearsals he emphasizes the
down beat, asking for an accent on landings, a downward thrust to the arms. “The
Russian way is down; it’s earthy,” he says.“Classics always [accent
the] up; here it should be more earthy. In this ballet, everything should be down.”
The birch trees— “one of the prettiest things in my life,” says
Possokhov— symbolize beauty. The ugliness in Rite, he says, is in the
people, and so he has opted to physically distort the Elders who choose the sacrificial
victim. The choice of whom to kill “should come from people who are abnormal,”
he explains. “So to show this abnormality, I have to find a shape of ugliness.”
He wants to show the coexistence of beauty and ugliness, that it’s “one
step from beautiful to ugly.”

In pairing his concept and movement with the music, Possokhov says he decided to
work with “phrases I can hear myself” rather than relying on the written
score. At first this music is hard to understand, he says, but once you do, it has
“such harmony. There’s a logic to it.”

“The score is hard,” agrees Music Director& Principal
Conductor Martin West, “but it’s very satisfying.” What listeners
find so complicated, he says, isn’t so bad for the musicians “because
it’s so brilliantly written.” The difficulty is with the size of the orchestra
and the piece’s rhythmic drive. “It’s very hard to get maybe 80
players—it’s a huge orchestra—to lock in on one rhythmic groove,”
West says.“There’s this forward energy, which why it’s so exciting.”
Portions of the score (for example, “The Glorification of the Chosen One”)
are “a conductor’s nightmare,” West says. “The meter changes
every single bar, but with huge venom, so it doesn’t take much to shake you
off the track, only a slight wobble. And when you’re playing in the orchestra,
there’s always a wobble. It’s like driving a car—you’re always
veering around to correct the camber on the road. So the orchestra is always adjusting
itself.”

With The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky created “a complete new language,”
says West. “He even said that he didn’t know how to write it down. He
knew what it was meant to sound like, but there was no language for it. The rhythms
are outlandish.”The music is based on folk melodies, but they’re deeply
buried. So part of what Stravinsky was doing, West says, was trying to re-create the
sound of Russian folk instruments. “That’s why the bassoon is so high
in the beginning,” he explains.“Nowadays it sounds beautiful. But a hundred
years ago bassoonists could barely play it. It was meant to sound horrible.”

Possokhov calls working with this rule-defying Russian composer “passing
through the school of Stravinsky music”— a necessary part of learning
to make what he calls “big ballets.” So given the chance to make a The
Rite of Spring, he says, “I had to do it.” And happily, it’s
here in San Francisco that he’s doing it. In the next year he has plenty of
projects that willtake him far from home, including to Russia’s Ural region
for a new ballet based on Alexander Pushkin’s story “The Snow Storm”
and to Slovenia to make a full length ballet for his friend Irek Mukhanedov, formerly
of the Bolshoi and Royal Ballets, who now heads Slovenian National Theatre Opera and
Ballet Ljubljana.

The Rite of Spring, says West, creates “a very visceral response.”
In the “Glorification” movement, “it’s like the world is rocking,”
he says. “The orchestra is just whipping; the maestro is almost throwing it
in the air.” What Possokhov hears in the music for Rite of Spring is
brutality, and his visceral response is “not to be sophisticated with choreography,”
to make the steps “more rough, more spontaneous.” There is deep meaning
in this music, he says, and it’s up to him to reveal it.